UNITED Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has urged a group of 40 experts on artificial intelligence (AI) to help steer AI toward shaping peace and security, human rights, and sustainable development.
Addressing the inaugural meeting of the Independent International Scientific Panel on AI that the UN convened on Tuesday, Guterres said “the world urgently needs a shared, global understanding of artificial intelligence, grounded not in ideology, but in science.”
He said he had seen “how quickly fear can take hold when facts are missing or distorted — how trust breaks down and division deepens.”
Guterres’ concerns reflect the world’s fascination with — and fear of — the still-evolving technology. Is the genie that has been released from the lamp benevolent or evil?
It is both. AI is a tool that benefits mankind and at the same time threatens it.
In 2023, an open letter posted by the Future of Life Institute, a nonprofit organization dedicated to “reduce global catastrophic and existential risk from powerful technologies,” proposed a six-month moratorium on developing training AI systems more powerful than the Generative Pre-trained Transformer 4, or GPT4, at that time the most advanced learning technology.
The group appealed to AI labs and independent experts to use the hiatus to jointly formulate and implement a set of safety protocols for advanced AI design and development “that are rigorously audited and overseen by independent outside experts.”
The letter sparked intense debate. Supporters of the moratorium insist that AI developers could eventually find themselves in a frenzied race “to develop and deploy ever more powerful digital minds that no one — not even their creators — can understand, predict or reliably control.”
Critics accused the organization of “misdirection,” focusing attention on “hypothetical” risks that super-intelligent AI systems could bring, instead of addressing present problems.
The moratorium never materialized, and GPT4 has since gone through several upgrades. The latest, GPT6, boasts greater memory capabilities “designed to make interactions feel more personalized, consistent and human-like.”
In a message marking World Day of Social Communications in January, Pope Leo XIV observed that generative AI can now replicate, alter and manufacture images, music and text that are indistinguishable from those made by humans.
“The challenge... is a matter of protecting human identity and authentic relationships,” the pope said.
A month earlier, he had condemned the increasing use of AI in military applications, warning against delegating life and death decisions to machines.
Several weeks later, AI-boosted missiles were unleashed with lethal precision by the United States and Israel in attacking targets inside Iran.
What is desperately needed is a framework for AI governance — rules and guiding principles to ensure that the good side always prevails over the bad.
Such a framework must be able to quickly adapt to the lightning speed at which AI is advancing.
The pope also believes that “appropriate regulation can protect people from an emotional attachment to chatbots and contain the spread of false, manipulative or misleading content, preserving the integrity of information against its deceptive simulation.”
Several countries have on their own tried to establish a semblance of AI governance.
During the term of former president Joe Biden, the US required major AI developers to share the results of their safety tests with the government. The European Union was also working on a law to set up safeguards against runaway AI development.
The Philippines has crafted its own National AI Strategy in anticipation of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (FIRe), a period that “will change everything from products and processes to design philosophies and business models — a multifaceted phenomenon involving technology, people and the environment.”
The government, however, acknowledged that for FIRe to be effective, the country’s AI regulatory framework needs to be reinforced. And that itself presents an awesome challenge.
Guterres said that with geopolitical tensions mounting and conflicts raging, the need for collective action for achieving “safe and responsible AI could not be greater.”
He said the panel of AI experts was in a race against time. It is a race that the world cannot afford to lose.
